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Robert has already indicated some unclear points (the same IP C-class or not?), and there are more, like domain ownership (if both domains have the same owner, backlinks value will be lowered).

Additionally, we know nothing about the strength of your non-commercial site (if you at least quoted some stats from the Open Site Explorer, we could help you more).

Generally, you could gain some benefit, but I would not expect it to be earth-shattering, unless your non-commercial site is really strong.

In link building, distribution of your backlinks among many domains is very important. You need various backlinks from different sources to really feel the difference in rankings.

Hi Viggo,

what you're describing here is a common issue but also easy to fix.

If you can access and edit .htaccess on your server, you will only need to implement a simple rule which will redirect all traffic either to the www or non-www version of your website via a 301 redirect.

If you want to force the use of "www" in all cases, your rule should look like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^www.example.com [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^

$RewriteRule ^/(.*)         http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R]

You can refer here for more information.

Your example is not a case where you would use canonical links.

Canonical links are useful when you have several pages which are accessible vial individual URLs and do not redirect to a single page, yet they have very similar content.

A great example is a category page in an online store. Quite often, you will find various sorting methods, like price, popularity, etc. These various sorting methods usually add a parameter to the URL, something like "order=price". Yet, the content remains largely the same.

In cases such as above, the different pages should have a canonical reference to the main page.

In your case, you simply need a 301 redirect, that's all.

Sure you can use schema.org tags throughout your site, whenever it makes sense.

There are so many schema.org tags it's hard to give any specific recommendations without knowing your site, but there are tags for product images, for ratings (individual and aggregate), etc. - it is clear that your inner pages are more than likely to have content which can be tagged.

Just make sure that you don't go over the board, i.e. avoid spammy tactics like fake aggregate ratings. They could make your SERPs look better and improve CTR in the short term, but your site could be easily penalized for such practices.

Hi,

no, implementing a Shareasale affiliate program should not have any negative impact on your SEO efforts. All affiliate traffic must be channeled through Shareasale redirects, and all affiliates will link to these redirect links.

It means that affiliates will not generate any strange backlinks to your site.

Hi,

press releases are more of a marketing tool than an SEO tool. When it comes to obtaining backlinks, they are not very effective due to (a) restrictions of PR distribution sites concerning anchored links, (b) duplication, as mentioned by you.

Yet, if you're hoping to get some backlinks, and if you're using several PR distribution services, it would be highly recommended to have several different versions, one unique for each service. If not possible, you could at least consider different titles and opening paragraphs.

If press releases consistute only a small part of your overall content, I wouldn't be too worried about any negative SEO implications resulting from duplication. In the worst case, a PR site with more authority than your site will outrank you for that specific content. Given that PR services should mainly be used to deliver your message to poeple, not the search engines, it's ok with me.

Hi,

there are a few ways you could go about this.

1. First of all, if you're an expert in this field, you will probably include a number of good keywords in a very natural way, just by knowing your stuff.

2. Try tools like ubersuggest.org - it scrapes Google Suggest quite efficiently. I believe with Google Suggest you can often find a lot of hidden gems not reported by the Google Keyword Tool.

3. Try extracting keywords from other pages which are already ranking for your target term. My favorite way of doing this is using a free Microsoft extension for Excel called Ad Intelligence, available from http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/adcenter-downloads/microsoft-advertising-intelligence You can use the built-in keyword wizard to paste a number of other URLs, and the tool will try to extract all related keywords. Works very well for me.

You can try a similar trick with the Google Keyword Tool, by providing a website and not a specific keyword as a seed for your research.

4. This might not be feasible / out of the budget, but running an Adwords campaign with some more generic phrases and "broad" match often helps discover a number of surprising phrases people are looking for your content.

5. Get SEOQuake for Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/seoquake-seo-extension/ - to review several top pages ranking for your keywords. Pay special attention to the "Density" report which shows you the most frequently used keywords on these pages, and to the Diagnosis report which you can use to find phrases used in meta description, meta keywords and header tags.

I hope some of these tricks will help you.

Hi Sara,

it's difficult to provide any specific hints without seeing the website in question.

I would suggest that you start by reading Webmaster Guidelines from Google:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Make sure that you site complies with these recommendations, especially when it comes to content. If many pages on your site are thin on content, or have duplicate content issues, these would be the likely reasons.

Hi Sara,

Google Webmaster Tools are well known for their lag in reporting various stats. Just give it a couple more days.

In the meantime, you can use a tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider or A1 Website Auditor to perform a crawl of your site. These tools will easily find any outstanding issues with duplicate descriptions, titles, etc.

On a related note, there's really not much point in keeping meta keywords tag today. It is obsolete and irrelevant, so you could as well get rid of it. Please refer to this video from Matt Cutts - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jK7IPbnmvVU

The same applies to other major search engines.

Hi Markus,

Absolute links leave less room for confusion and mistakes when it comes to crawling. Google recommends using absolute links here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35156

Keep in mind, this recommendation has nothing to do with your rankings. When properly configured, relative links are as effective as absolute links. There is just a higher risk that a relative link is malformed and broken.

On the other hand, relative links are extremely convenient when you want to change domain name. With absolute links, you would have a lot of search and replace. Something to keep in mind when making a decision.

Hi,

without a detailed review of your website, it is rather difficult to provide a definite answer. It is for example possible that you have links from your desktop site to your mobile site but not the other way round which would make your mobile content rank higher.

It is also possible that your mobile site is easier to crawl for bots because it is using a simpler navigation etc.

Generally, if the content is approximately the same, I agree that using canonical URLs could help.

There are many tools which will scrape SERPs, then scrape WHOIS data and mass submit link exchange requests.

High quality link builders will customize their emails, but that costs money.

So, I guess in your case it was semi-automated. As the request seems, according to you, relevant to your site, the mass mailing targets could be pre-screened by a human, but after that, it's all automated.

If want to have a sitemap, you actually need two of them in your case, as both will include different links from different parts of your website (Magento-based and Wordpress-based).

You don't need both sitemaps in the root. Your wordpress sitemap can be in the "resources" directory , as the only restriction is that sitemaps cannot refer URLs higher in the directory tree. As all your wordpress URLs have "resources" as their base, there is no problem here.

To notify Google of your sitemaps, add your site to Google Webmaster Tools (http://google.com/webmasters) and go to Site configuration / Sitemaps. From there, you will be able to both test your sitemap, add it, and later, when already added, you will see its indexing rate.

You will also gain a lot of valuable insight by adding your site to Google Webmaster Tools, so you should do it anyway.

If you have more questions, I will be glad to help you further.

There actually many tools which could do the job, both free and paid.

1. Xenu Link Sleuth - free, available at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. Screaming Frog - free (limited)/paid, available at http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

3. A1 Website Analyzer - paid, but with a fully functional trial, available at http://www.pendragonexpress.com/hop/a1

4. LinkExaminer - free, available at http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/Network/lnkexam/Freeware.htm

5. Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - free, available at http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit

If you just need a crawl, I would recommend 1, 4 or 5. They are both free and work fast.  If you want to optimize your content, 5 is a powerhouse.

Hope it helps.

Marcin